From "III Writing" Luca Turin's Creative Life...

The first thing he had to do was learn a lot more about everything. The biology, the chemistry, and the physics, with which he'd started and which meant, most immediately, electron tunneling. He got on a train to Cambridge University, the physics department. Came back exhausted. E-mailed Stewart: "Was in Cambridge all day (great place!!). Visit to C. J. Adkins, inelastic electron-tunneling-spectroscopy specialist, head of the low-temperature physics lab at the Cavendish [the main Cambridge physics laboratory], fellow of Jesus College. Great lunch in the Tudor dining room (curious how all Tudor looks fake, even the real stuff), then long discussion about electron tunneling." Adkins had reeled off information, suggested this and that. Turin had sat and absorbed, had been surprised that "probably the best way of doing it is with a cheap STM," which was nice, "just put a droplet of the stuff between substrate and point and get spectra at room temperature." Very simple. "Adkins a very nice man, took a lot of time over it, all afternoon in fact. Showed me a nifty piece of work they'd done where they look at the C-H stretch vibration at high resolution. . . . Cambridge itself too small as a town for comfort, but still impressive. Much better to be lost in London when you leave work." But he drooled over the lab. "The Cavendish great place, full of wonderful-looking hardware carved out of solid stainless steel."

.... Sometimes he quaked before the idea he'd set himself to birthing. Other times he simply plunged ahead. Several times in his life he'd gone through periods of extremely, almost painfully intense creativity. He loved the monastic, obsessional feel of it, a spiritual agony in intellectual form, the interior emotional buzz of the thing. It was a rhythm that worked for him, spending most of his conscious hours in the dusty crystal silence of the library stacks.

And then it started getting less silent library and more chemical party. He had to find smells now, match them to molecules, match molecules to vibrations. He had to start creating, and he began mixing chemicals, whipping up electron vibrations, wholeheartedly in his mode as mad cook. He was running into Jane Brock's lab, down the hall into Tim Arnett's office, tracking down Martin Rosendaal and hunting Tibor Krenacs, armed with smells, dragging molecules around the old department building on Gower Street and shoving things under their noses several times a day, ordering, "Smell this!" They always did. He'd demand, "What does this smell like?" He'd wait till they'd smelled it and tried to identify it before he'd propose his own ideas. And they'd say whatever came into their minds, "rusted iron" or "hot cotton cloth" or "hand cream and plastic," and he'd nod or frown or say, "Well, does it smell like this?" and then, effortlessly, he'd give the words that exactly, precisely described the way that the molecule smelled, exactly the description they were groping for. Or he wouldn't bother waiting and would simply demand, "This smells like Styrofoam and fresh basil, doesn't it?"

They watched him. It was having an effect on them, too. Very subtly, without her noticing it happening, Jane Brock realized he had completely changed the way she perceived the space she lived in. It was, she said, as if he'd added a texture to everything, a dimension she'd never perceived. Everywhere she went now, she was conscious of smells.

As Turin's guinea pigs, they all reacted differently. Brock was always interested, supplying him the choice descriptors as best she could, though she was sometimes apologetic about her lack of "expertise." ("Oh, hell, 'expertise'!" Turin said. "Doesn't exist! Everyone can smell as well as everyone else!") Arnett was attentive and utterly sincere and completely petrified of the beasts shoved toward his nose. He produced adjectives warily. Rosendaal, just next door, was more cynical, though game enough, offering sardonic olfactory definitions that Turin then took away to think about. Tibor Krenacs, the Hungarian cell biologist, a darker presence parsimonious with his reactions and wary of facile description, enjoyed growing renown on the floor for purist adjectival obstinacy. If he didn't think something smelled like something else, he absolutely wouldn't supply the descriptive, no matter what Turin threw at him. But, Turin would say, it had this or that vibration! Krenacs the purist refused to be foxed. He approached the molecules and their smells with an admirable seriousness of purpose, determinedly impartial as a referee, analytical as a sommelier, sober as a judge.

When something finally worked, they celebrated. They'd go to Tim Arnett's office and open a bottle of the really good wine, since Turin insisted, and drink it in honor of whatever molecule had graciously agreed to smell the way Turin thought its tiny vibrations should make it smell.

Turin was monomaniac. "I don't have a social life," Turin said to them. "I don't give a toss about a social life. I'm only interested in either extremely intimate personal relationships or productive professional relationships." He was living in London and Françoise was, as always, in Paris, so in London it was all concentration. He would come home and fix dinner by himself and sit in front of five hours of TV, thinking about the theory the whole time. He passed weekends in which he uttered not a word to any human being. His flat was an absolute mess. He wouldn't touch it for two weeks at a time, and so he lived, said Brock, who actually witnessed the phenomenon, "in a total pigsty. Filthy, unwashed plates from days before, rubbish overflowing from the trash can onto the floor. It was great." Bare white walls, nothing at the windows, plain blue carpet, the cheapest possible blue sofa you could buy, his stereo system and a piece of wood sitting on top of a trunk, which was the table on which all his papers and everything else got piled. Hundreds of classical CDs strewn across the floor. The bathroom hadn't been cleaned for months. On the rare occasions when Françoise came to London, he'd make an effort to clean. The trash was emptied, the papers were arranged in neater piles. Then she'd leave, and it would go to hell again. It bothered him (but not enough to do anything about it) that if he died and people came to find his body they'd see the apartment and think, "My God, he was living like an animal!"

But he just didn't have time-or, more precisely, interest. The thing was moving. Turin would come bouncing into their offices at the most inappropriate moments and rip the lid off something extremely evil-looking and shove it forward and say, "Smell this!" They would get nothing more than a glance at the lid, S-Cs and S-O-Hs forming dimers. Turin would say cheerfully, "Don't worry, not toxic, perfectly harmless," which is what he said about everything, including the deadly poisons. Brock and Rosendaal and Krenacs would brace themselves and lean forward, but Arnett was-and he was quite insistent about it-"a coward with a natural instinct to caution," and because Turin worked with S-H groups a fair amount, even if it wasn't extremely toxic, it was fair odds the thing would smell horrific. If you passed by in the hall you'd hear Arnett saying for the fifth time, No! I won't smell that, and Turin saying, Oh, smell it! and in the end Arnett would brace himself and grimace and have a little sniff. (Oh, good Christ, Luca, what the hell is that?! Turin [very interested]: So how would you describe that?)

Arnett was walking the linoleum halls with an increasingly guarded, uneasy look. Rosendaal and Brock came to expect Turin's exploding through the door, recounting astonishing things about smells. At the same time, Turin's attention span was short, and they'd often find him on the Internet reading about some American air force base or how to land a plane. When he was bored, he went and played.

To Arnett's dismay, Turin had little conception of the niceties of fume cupboards, "where," Arnett reminded him, "you're supposed to store these things so you don't shorten everyone's life to thirty-five years." Turin grumbled. Arnett was the safety officer, conducting inspections: no toxins left out, no eating, no smoking. Turin did all of those. When one day an absolutely asphyxiating rotten-egg smell came rolling into his office, Arnett ran down the hall (it was getting stronger as he approached Turin's lab) and burst in, and Turin, wearing a look of glee, shoved some compound at him and said, "Smell this, it smells really bad, doesn't it!" Arnett roared that he should put the damn things in the fume cupboard, to which Turin hotly retorted something about "bureaucracy," to which Arnett replied, objectively if not calmly, that Turin might hate boring things like safety and loathe the idea that anyone would control him, but he was poisoning them all and being antisocial. So they had a huge row and didn't speak for a fortnight. Geoff Burnstock, the department head, got them to be friends again. For goodness sake, Luca, sniffed Arnett, can't you work on something that doesn't involve S-H groups?

"The thing about Luca," says Arnett, "is that he has this reality-distortion field. Which he freely admits." ("Bullshit," says Turin, half the time, and the other half "Yes, that's true.")

There were a million knickknacks he had to track down and buy, pieces of software, measuring tools, smell molecules. Turin waited for what seemed like forever for them to arrive in his postbox so he could inhale their atomic fragrance, meanwhile setting things up, looking things up, downloading bits and pieces. Brock was saying to him, "I know you'll figure this out," and everyone on the Department of Anatomy's second floor was pushing him on, "Go, go, go!" He was a bit awed by it, the enthusiasm from others, the support, but he generated it by laying each new piece of Vibration's puzzle before them, and they responded. "I was devoting complete concentration to making this work," he explained later. "I was manic. I didn't have a life."

But he did have a life. He had a creative life.....